1.6 Million people, mostly children, die every year from disease related to unclean water and poor sanitation. Life Force Kiosks, a non-profit operating in Kenya, was formed to help provide clean water to all.

2 Year Anniversary

It’s amazing that two years ago today, Life Force Kiosks launched in Kibera. I’m so proud of my team for their continued dedication toward improving the lives in their community. We’re closing in on an exciting milestone – 1 million liters of water purified . I can’t wait to announce that, and it shouldn’t be too much longer.

This past year has been very interesting. For several months, our focus was split as we engaged in a partnership with an organization called Impact Carbon. Impact Carbon’s work improves health, reduces poverty, and improves local environments while slowing climate change. They build and support projects that help people access new technologies such as clean cookstoves and water treatment systems. They leverage carbon finance and social finance to bring these projects to scale.

Life Force Kiosks and Impact Carbon joined forces to help get chlorine-based community water treatment qualified for carbon offset financing. For those of you not familiar with carbon offset financing, I’ll give a brief description. Basically companies and individuals make financial contributions to help “reduce their carbon footprint”. If you’ve bought a ticket on Expedia recently, they probably asked if you wanted to donate a few bucks towards this. Of course your $7 can’t reduce the fuel used for your flight, so instead that money is pooled to fund projects that reduce the use of natural resources like trees and coal around the world. In many developing nations, wood and coal is used to boil water to purify water. Life Force Kiosks purifies water with chlorine, reducing the need to boil water. During the past year we acted as a proof-of-concept to show that our model (and related non-boiling technologies like ceramic water filters), could effectively reduce the burning of wood and charcoal. I’m pleased to say that after a lot hard work from Steve and the Impact Carbon team, we were successful in demonstrating this and non-boiling water treatment received approval for carbon funding.

With that success came some tradeoffs. As Steve spent a significant amount of time working with Impact Carbon, Life Force Kiosks was not able to have quite the same impact in Kibera this past year compared to our first. However, we did purify over 330,000 liters of water this past year, bringing our total to over 875,000 liters of water since we went live.

We’re continuing to transfer more ownership of LFK’s operations to the Kenyan management team. I remain committed to the cause and to LFK, but I also believe that our long-term success is dependent on the ownership of our Kenyan team. They’re the ones living in Kibera, seeing first-hand the problems that exist there, and are in the best position to execute solutions to those problems.

I look forward to hopefully announcing that we’ve purified over a million liters of water in the next few months. Again, I’d like to thank everyone who’s supported Life Force Kiosk and enabled us to achieve these fantastic results. And of course Life Force Kiosks would be nothing without Steve, Freddy, and our vendors, so thank you so much for the work you do every day. Happy anniversary, Life Force Kiosks.